GNU AWK is a pattern scanning and processing tool.  It conforms to the
definition of the language in the POSIX 1003.1 Standard.  This version in
turn is based on the description in The AWK Programming Language, by Aho,
Kernighan, and Weinberger.  Gawk provides the additional features found in the
current version of Brian Kernighan's awk(1) and a number of GNU-specific
extensions.

Among these extensions:
- profiler
- interactive debugger a la GDB
- file inclusion, useful to share code between Gawk scripts
- API for loadable extension modules
- lint mode to warn about possible portability problems
- bignums, for arbitrary precision arithmetic
- socket networking
